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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

>We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years.

I just don't take it seriously anymore. Track 200 factors, 200 businesses, or 200 industries and you will see 1 event per year. Track all of the above and you will see 40,000 such events in a year.

More to the point, their actuarial model was probably wrong, not reality. Somewhere buried in their model were assumptions excluding black swan events

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You can pretty much blame six sigma for these braindead once in 200 years predictions. When you beat your effecency numbers into the ground then have to explain a .000001 varianc will only happen in 200 years based on this totally detached from real world statistic model is hew you get here.

The person that sold that idea cashed out and left the company long ago.

I think the more thought-provoking question is what exactly is the Black Swan event? If only 37% of their ICU beds are used for COVID patients then why are so many more people dying right now?

It is the US so unlike most of the rest of the world even if there were a lot of surplus ICU beds most people can't afford the 100K USD with insurance or 1M USD with under-insurance or no insurance it would cost them out of pocket to receive treatment.

> most people can't afford the 100K USD with insurance or 1M USD with under-insurance or no insurance it would cost them out of pocket to receive treatment

Where are you getting these numbers? I know multiple people in the US who have needed a COVID ICU bed, and they certainly weren't paying $100k out of pocket to do so. In most areas of the US, $100k could buy you a small house.

Three years ago, 0% of ICU beds were used for COVID patients. Now it is 37%. If ICU admission correlates with risk of death, and those beds would have been empty otherwise, or used for lower risk patients, a 40% increase in deaths seems reasonable. Certainly not a rigorous analysis, but it passes the smell test.

Homicides are up, In Atlanta it's 65% from 2019, other cities are similar. I think car fatalities as well. Then the isolation, COVID fears and economic issues have made worse an already growing drug and suicide problem.

I've known of quite a few deaths of youngish people recently and only one was COVID related. Car crashes, ODs and other medical issues. Like I've known two girls both about 30 that died unexpectedly of non-covid medical issues last year.

1) 37% of ICU beds for Covid means about a 50% increase in ICU patients.

2) If you go into the ICU for Covid you're probably leaving via the morgue. The survival chance for a Covid patient in the ICU is a lot lower than the typical ICU patient.

There is one possibility which this community will flag & downvote anyone for suggesting, which is shameful; the idea should be entertained and then dismissed, if appropriate.

You may be interested to see Kaiser Permanente's recent study, suggesting that more than one in 2,000 young men are experiencing untimely heart disease with a known cause: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268209v...

Ok, but the important ones are resource limited and possibly highly correlated. So if you see 1/200 for all sorts of (possibly correlated) events you might be misreading the implication.

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