You're looking at an order of magnitudes more deaths. And that's before you add in deaths from hospitals being overloaded from COVID.
https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm
According to the New York Times, we're up to 52,244,696 reported cases and 814,970 deaths total so far.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
In 2019: 2,854,838 people died in the United States.
Because of the difficulty of applying objective disability effect proportions, however, YLL is a much easier metric to use and there's a lot more estimates available for it as well. I found an article estimating pandemic YLL in the U.S. over 2020 to be 7,362,555 (massive 95% PI though) [1]. Interestingly, they attribute only about three quarters of these to COVID itself and about one quarter to indirect effects of the pandemic, such as lockdown. Comparing against YLL values for leading causes of death from 2016 [2], the impact of COVID in 2020 was slightly less than that of ischemic heart disease (9,445,400 YLL) but comparable to the next four causes of death (lung cancer, RTAs, pulmonary disease, colo/rectal cancer) combined.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256835
[2] https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2018.0158, Table 1
So the number of YLL lost to the small number of 25 year olds dying at their own hand is very very likely much smaller than the much larger number of 50-90 year olds dying.
Even the small number of YLL to the death of an elderly person in a care home still had knock on effects for the survivors, from delayed funerals to funerals as super spreader events.
To make it complete you should also post the total deaths and suicides for 2020.
Do you have a source for this? I just looked this up, and evidence for any sort of lockdown->suicide link seems very mixed (many places saw a decrease in suicides). The only places I’m seeing +50% is among specific populations in specific locations.
"""The provisional number of suicides in 2020 (45,855) was 3% lower than in 2019 (47,511). The provisional age-adjusted suicide rate was also 3% lower in 2020 (13.5 per 100,000) than in 2019 (13.9)"""
I’ll be honest, having spent time reviewing your comment for the better part of two minutes, I'm very skeptical of your conclusions. You seem to have started with the assumptions that lockdowns are more damaging than COVID, and then cherry picked the data you've reviewed to fit that.
My personal opinion is that lockdowns were a reasonable public health measure to deploy in 2020 when other public health measures were unavailable, and not enough was known about the risk and dynamics of the virus. The evidence of their effectiveness seems to be mixed. And (my personal opinion again), they aren't the right public health measure for 2021/2022. But to say lockdowns were "far more damaging" than COVID, or even came close to the direct harm from COVID simply isn't supported by the data.
This idea that lockdowns caused spikes in non-Covid deaths seems highly dubious to me. From what I've seen it's actually the other way round, for instance deaths from influenza, or from accidents, are reduced during those periods.
The excess deaths is a negative, so policies saved lives. Possibly the crudest measure of good governance that exists.
https://coronialservices.justice.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Chie...
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/04/coronavir...
How come? Excess deaths doesn't point fingers to death from a coronavirus infection but rather to death from the COVID situation as a whole.
The lock down also reduced deaths related to car and workplace accidents.
Very good map.
The reason excess deaths are important because they are computed from the total number of deaths in a period (again, if you look at month X, the consolidated numbers are usually stable at month X + 2/3 months) which in turn just match with the number of death certificates issued by an enormous number small independent administrative authorities, so they cannot be easily manipulated by state actors, so they can shut up FUD'ers.
I think it's easy to misconstrue data and we should be cognizant of the fact there are multiple factors. I fully believe covid19 is contributing to deaths, but at the same time, it's by no means the only factor.
Here's a simple exercise. It's believed COVID19 was on the loose in the US as early as 2019.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/06/15/evidence-suggests-cov...
Is it definitive no, but look at when the deaths start. It happens just after the lockdowns are announced -- April 4th is the first week with excess deaths.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
That's two to four weeks after the lockdowns got into full swing. That also happens to coincide with stories of nursing homes being abandoned
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/04/09/california-...
On top of that, lockdowns were not (except in some cities, at the very beginning) really strict. People could go out for grocery shopping, to walk out the dog, to go to and from the work place (even crossing country borders), and there were exceptions to people with certain medical conditions (disabled, kids with disabilities, etc.) and people accompanying them.
But here we are, and now that we have imperfect statistics people can discount them as useless.
That is - if we never had lockdowns, that the death toll from rampant COVID spreading through the population would have been lower than the hypothetical lockdown-triggered death toll (extra suicides, drug OD's, and elderly loneliness deaths).
As a thought experiment:
Say you have a button. If you push it then it saves the lives of 100 people that would have had a heart attack. However, it gives 1000 people random mental health problems from depression to anxiety to addictions. Do you push the button?
Or say you have another button. If you push it then it saves the lives of 100 people that would have had a heart attack. However, it financially cripples 1000 people (causes people to lose jobs, businesses, etc.). Do you push the button?
How to you balance "death" against other kinds of harms?
We can't push buttons to stop natural disasters but we can push buttons to limit the deaths due to wildfire, heat, floods, freezing, electricity and natural gas outages. But doing so requires governments and communities to be proactive and to pre-build resiliency into the communities.
Alot of other problems got worse because COVID as you had “supply chain” problems with everything from health practitioner availability to hospital availability to actual product availability.
If you were in a place where the hospital is full and you have a stroke or a heart attack, there’s an elevated risk that you’re going to die in the ER. If you are stabilized in the ER and need ICU or other specialty care… there’s an elevated risk that you’re gonna die because you’re stuck in a triage cart in the ER without adequate medical attention.
It’s a hard policy problem. Everything is fine, until it isn’t. Hitting various resource constraints create cascading situations that kill people.
> Also in terms of human years lost, the lockdowns are far more damaging at this point
It's hard to calculate because of long covid, but there is a point where in aggregate, restrictions have cost more time than lost time from premature deaths.
> The researchers noted a 31% increase in the proportion of mental health-related emergency department visits that occurred among teenagers in 2020, compared with the year before.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-06-11/...
Now, is it accurate? I'm not sure. Do those result in deaths? I'm also not sure, it might be reduced deaths due to more people home. I honestly have no idea.
Rises in adolescent harm are deeply concerning, and are undoubtedly partially attributable to the stresses of the last 18 months. But they aren't a statistical driver, and CDC statistics actually show a decrease in the number of suicides in 2020[2]. And that's probably for the reason you mentioned: more bodies under the same roof means that it's harder for people to take their lives.
So to summarize: fewer people died by suicide in 2020 than did in 2019, and we can't extrapolate overall suicide trends from just adolescents.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/...