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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting about this is that it doesn't look like it accounts for the expected reduction in deaths due to lockdown -- a lot of people die in car accidents every year, and at least early on in the pandemic, miles traveled was reduced by nearly 90%, and car accidents went way down, and even further down when you consider it was impossible to drive home drunk from a bar.

Which means the excess deaths would be even higher than shown here, at least early on.

EDIT: Looks like I am wrong. Below someone links to a report showing that traffic fatalities actually went up because the people still on the road were more risky. I was basing my statement on estimates made in early 2020.

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I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "accidents" going way down, but at least in the US, fatalities have gone up. In the US, there were more traffic fatalities in 2020 since 2007.

See https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2020-fatality-data-show... for example.

That's kinda wild and really counter-intuitive. From the article:

NHTSA’s research suggests that throughout the national public health emergency and associated lockdowns, driving patterns and behaviors changed significantly, and that drivers who remained on the roads engaged in more risky behavior, including speeding, failing to wear seat belts, and driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

I can see a few things driving this. First, I think that pretty much everybody was under more stress in that period -- anybody on the road would be less patient and less generous / more aggressive. Second, there's some sampling bias -- the people on the road would be either essential workers (underpaid, overworked, even more stressed) or oversampled from a risk-tolerant subset of the population (more inclined to see an open road as an opportunity to drive recklessly). The risk calculation of driving drunk would go down with emptier roads, too.

I think it's counterintuitive unless you account for the fact that it's intuitive to think that the roads will be empty, which should impact people's behavior. I don't think I would have bet either way, but post-facto justification seems pretty tidy.

I think the explanation is easier.

All the well to do white collar workers who circle jerk about how safe they are were in their home offices leaving the less safe demographics (basically just younger and poorer) on the road thereby increasing the average riskiness of the average road user, driven mile, etc, etc.

Crime in general has been going up. Does this include DUIs and reckless driving?

It was a wonderful time when you could just drive as fast as you wanted without any significant repercussions. I’ll never forget.

Evidently that attitude is what lead to greater likelihood of 'repercussions' that average.

People were frustrated and arguably so. I agree with targeted lockdowns or even draconian lockdowns (if it would stop the pandemic on its heels). But it’s going to frustrate people. Social psychology would say such pent up frustration has to be released somewhere and we saw that in the rise in domestic violence, car accidents and crime. (I’m not trying to justify it. It’s the way it is. Next time we have a pandemic may be we’ll also factor in these indirect variables in decide the scope and duration).

Early on in the pandemic when roads were fairly empty, the local cops operating the speed traps wouldn't pull anyone over -- they'd just stand on the side of the road waving at you and making 'slow down' hand signals. Glorious indeed...

Great time to set some records too apparently!

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cannonball-coast-coast-...

Yeah I don't think that record will ever be broken. Until the next pandemic I suppose.

Haha. I do recall my amazement at driving from San Mateo all the way to the Bay Bridge without my speed dropping below 80 mph.

Very mind blowing experience.

Also a cause of increased traffic fatalities it seems

When a mind is blown, sometimes it literally explodes.

A recent article and HN discussion on that topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29492129

Fascinating, I hadn't seen that report. What I said was based on estimates made in 2020 and I never went back to check otherwise. Thanks, editing my comment now.

It's possible that lockdown didn't reduce deaths. Excess deaths is a tricky stat because it contains so much underlying confounding inputs that all you know is that more people died than what you expected based on historical averages and that is --all-- you can get from it reliably.

Yeah I would look for “medical” deaths (as opposed to crime, suicides and accidents) as the metric to compare to covid deaths. Not sure if that data is widely available.

The other thing to add to the mix of ups and downs is that the demographic of covid deaths is overly people with a short life expectancy so I would expect 2021 excess deaths to be reduced by the 2020 covid deaths that would have died in 2021 otherwise.

I agree with this. I think that would be a measure of the direct impact and as long as it also factors in all types of medical deaths. I personally know people who died waiting for a hospital bed for completely unrelated stuff.

But what about places where less people died than normal?

I'm sure there were more overdoses and suicides due to the lockdowns too.

And there were indeed more of both:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/11/17/overdo...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-11/teen-suic...

Not in New Zealand - our suicide rate went down.

https://coronialservices.justice.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Chie...

There were more overdoses, but fewer suicides. Your second link references teen suicide attempts, which are neither representative of the overall suicidal demographic nor reflect actual suicide rates.

Suicide rates are tricky since mental health can have long lasting issues and the societal changes from lockdown will have even longer term effects. How do you attribute a suicide 2 years from now to depression that started during COVID? It’s going to be interesting seeing how the psychology field approaches this.

While that's true, a solid chunk (1/3) of suicides are based on pretty short cycles. That's why preventing a suicide is so valuable - 1/3 people you prevent are no more likely to attempt suicide again than a random person on the street. And that's without any psychological intervention. With therapy, that number gets even higher.

This is indeed an open question, and it's one we're going to need to address over the expected lifetimes of every single person who's living through COVID. We'll also need to address it for COVID "long-haulers," given that individuals with severely diminished qualities of life are a high-risk suicide group.

You’re getting downvoted because you appear to be guessing, even though you’re right…suicides and overdoses did indeed go up.

As I cited elsewhere in the thread: suicides went down in 2020, not up[1].

Drug overdose deaths are indeed up[2]. But they're an order of magnitude below COVID deaths, even before adjusting for undercounting.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR016.pdf

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...

ending it with an overdose does sound like a very accessible and "clean" method to end life if you're either an addict or even for non addicts who have access to hard drugs. And how many of those who are addicts engage in "suicidal ideation". Is a an addict that ends themselves statistically counted as a drug casualty and at what point do we see them as just another human being that decided to end their life. For all we know the drug might have been the only reason that kept them from not committing suicide much sooner (and while sober).

it seems an odd line to draw IMO

I don’t have any sources at hand but in Cincinnati, but a lot of the overdoses here are accidents from fentanyl being mixed into less powerful drugs.

I wonder what the median age for overdose deaths are compared to covid deaths.

I don't know how recent these numbers are, but the 25-44 and 45-54 male demographics are apparently over-represented in overdose deaths[1].

It's similarly hard to find up-to-date median age statistics for COVID deaths (and this is particularly troublesome, since the median age for COVID deaths should intuitively decrease over time), but the primary demographic seems to be >65 in most developed countries[2]. Interestingly, from that same source, it's lower in developing and undeveloped countries.

[1]: https://www.projectknow.com/discover/the-age-of-overdose/

[2]: https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/too-young-die-ag...

It seems that people out during lock-down are quite often those set on trouble and reckless behaviour. (That's a casual observation, not a moral statement.)

That's also the reason some European countries have full lock-down, as in curfews, because while most follow government recommendations, those that don't, operate in a vacuum without the checks and boundaries of normal social life and cause quite a lot more trouble and disturbance than they would in more normative circumstances.

That's a scary compounding factor that I hadn't even considered. Thanks for bringing that up.

In the US, traffic fatalities went up in 2020. The typical congestion of dangerous stroads has a calming effect on speeds, and that was absent with the enormous drop in traffic.

Thanks for correcting me. That's certainly counterintuitive on first blush, but does make sense and is consistent with my and others' experiences cycling in NYC in 2020/1: more aggressive driving became the norm, and cyclist and pedestrian deaths increased[1].

[1]: https://www.transalt.org/press-releases/vision-zero-in-crisi...

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