Comment by hamburglar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hamburglar | Hacker News Reader

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A really useful exercise you can do for yourself (I did it) is to download the CDC total US deaths data and plot each of the past 7 years as lines on an x axis that goes from week 1 to week 52 of the year. Keeping in mind that this graph does not take cause of death into account, you will note two striking features: 1) the death curves for the 5 years up to and including 2019 are extremely similar, with the exception that you can tell they are overall slightly elevated one winter by a particularly bad flu season (I think it was end of 2017 / beginning of 2018). And 2) 2020 and 2021 have very large Covid-surge-shaped excess death bumps that imply an incredibly strong correlation between Covid and the deviation in deaths from “normal” years. And if you find the delta between a “normal” year and the ones with the Covid-shaped bumps in it, it matches up extremely closely with the numbers CDC is also reporting as “Covid-related deaths.”

In order to say that a significant number of these are drug and suicide deaths, you’d also have to be positing a theory that drug and suicide deaths are also for some reason elevating themselves in precise timing with the Covid surges. I’m not going to claim this is impossible, but it does seem extremely far fetched to me, and I suspect seeing the data laid out like I describe would probably make you abandon your theory. (Edit: using ‘your theory’ colloquially here. I know you havent posited any specific theory here, but your line of reasoning and skepticism is clear)

Edit to add: I actually don’t doubt that excess drug and suicide deaths are partially responsible for general elevated death numbers. Lockdowns, isolation, job losses, etc are all certainly driving some of this. But these are slow and steady drivers, not ones that rise and fall precisely with the number of Covid cases, which takes me to the conclusion that they are in the noise compared to Covid itself. (And the CDC death categorizations happen to agree with that)

That’s a good suggestion. Here are the excess deaths for 25-44 year olds: https://imgur.com/a/b4Pobrh

There’s definitely a significant rise in excess deaths among 25-44 year olds coinciding with the Delta peak in August/September.

Something interesting though: In the Covid “valley” of June/July, when Covid-related deaths were at a record low nationally, 25-44 year olds still had a ~35% increase in excess deaths. I’d expect a drop in excess deaths close to prepandemic levels if they were being driven mainly by (short-term) Covid effects during that time. It seems like the baseline death rate increased independently of number of active Covid cases.

Covid deaths were accompanied by a steady increase in overdose deaths starting in early 2019 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm), rising from from 68k to 97k over the course of the pandemic.

I don’t have time at the moment to do the math, but I’d suspect most of the increase we’ve seen in the past year is due to Covid, but with the increase in overdoses and other causes contributing much than noise since 2019. This could explain the higher death rate that persisted throughout the summer.

It’s quite likely that the timing of 25-44 yo deaths from Covid has a much wider distribution than older age groups.

It seems reasonable to speculate that younger people are able survive longer with respiratory problems and probably have less co-morbidities.

Perhaps. But this means that when Covid deaths dropped to ~1,700/week nationally over the summer and 25-44 year olds still had ~800 excess deaths/week, almost half the people dying of Covid-19 in the US were young and nobody was talking about it. Seems unlikely.

Excess deaths includes deaths that were directly attributable due to other causes, but may still be indirectly caused by COVID. Suppose I were to break into a dialysis clinic and abscond with half the equipment. If this is an isolated incident, then patients can be sent to other clinics, or dialysis machines brought in. But suppose I were to break into every dialysis clinic and steal half the equipment. In that case, there's no surplus that can be shuffled around, and people would die. The direct cause of death would still be kidney failure, but I would have been the indirect cause.

In the same way, COVID puts pressure on the hospital system as a whole. Nurses who could have been monitoring a post-surgery recovery are instead monitoring ventilators in the COVID wing, or are quarantined after being exposed. The crash cart arrives a little bit slower to a heart attack, because the closest one was already in use. If the available nurses are on longer shifts, that contributes to sleep deprivation, making it easy to miss details that would otherwise have been caught.

This is true across all age groups. As of September, while COVID had 4.6 million direct fatalities, there had been 15 million excess deaths. Determining the final scope of COVID will be a matter of long research, and certainly isn't something that can be resolved in a short internet argument. Dismissing it as "Seems unlikely." when not even comparing between the same same type of measurement seems premature.

[0] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/econ-s06.html

>And 2) 2020 and 2021 have very large Covid-surge-shaped excess death bumps that imply an incredibly strong correlation between Covid and the deviation in deaths from “normal” years.

It would be more accurate to say "COVID-19 impacted years" than "incredibly strong correlation between Covid".

A lot of government and public policy changes were quickly made during these times. Are you willing to say with complete certainty that the lockdowns and associated increase in poor mental health had no impact?

We also had global supply chain crunches which affected food and medication availability (among other things). Are you willing to say that having certain brands of prevention / life saving drugs completely unavailable (forcing people to consult doctors for substitutes or go without) had no impact?

I think you’ll see that I very explicitly said I am not willing to definitively say those things, but that I am highly skeptical that those types of effects would be so responsive to the changes in number of Covid cases.

Does it in any way make sense to you that Covid cases falling by X% in a given week would directly cause an immediate corresponding drop in depression, drug overdose, or prescription drug supply chain issues? That would be absolutely incredible to me. It did however cause an immediate corresponding decline in excess deaths, regardless of assigning any cause. That tells me something.

> It did however cause an immediate corresponding decline in excess deaths, regardless of assigning any cause.

Did it, though? We see deaths increase in August/September during the Delta wave, but we don’t see them decline when Covid cases fell drastically earlier in the summer: https://imgur.com/a/b4Pobrh

That suggests 25-44 year olds may be experiencing an elevated death rate that persists even when Covid cases were low.

I’ll need to rerun my graphs. I haven’t done them since mid summer but at the time if you overlaid the Covid rise and fall on the excess deaths rise and fall it was uncanny how well they matched. The falling side of delta may have been different.

For anyone who wants to see this data without running the numbers themselves, the CDC has a dashboard showing total weekly deaths per week over the last several years, the trend line, and the obvious significant increases over the last couple years. They update it weekly, but it takes a couple weeks for the data to become accurate (the recent weeks have always been an undercount while reporting catches up).

For interpretation, the orange line is average expected deaths for that week, and you'd expect weekly deaths to cluster around that. Red is the "upper bound threshold", ie deaths over this are way out of the norm.

You can also switch the dashboard to "Excess deaths with and without COVID-19", which shows the same bar chart but with reported covid deaths stacked on top of non-covid reported deaths. It makes it clear that (1) excess deaths line up very well with reported deaths and (2) the US has done an overall good job of reporting covid deaths, outside of some probable undercounting at the very start.

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

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