Estimated cumulative excess deaths during Covid, World
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
That makes excess deaths valuable in the case of COVID.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/03/24/americans-misinf...
You say "normal people" as if not having co-morbidities is more common. But large swathes of the population are old, obese, have asthma or some other co-morbidity.
Why do you think that is?
Somehow, despite high rates of that specific comorbidity, the data shows Americans are hospitalized at dramatically lower rates than Americans estimate.
The post I replied to said:
> That complexity was pretty ruthlessly exploited here in the US by groups that wanted to downplay the issue [...]
Apparently it was not exploited too ruthlessly if surveys show people were still grossly overestimating COVID-19 severity in the population.
Does this result in better COVID-19 policies being made? Who is responsible for this disconnect between reality and what is perceived? How can we fix it?
Or does it even need fixing? Perhaps we'd save more lives if everyone were convinced half of COVID-19 cases were fatal.
They then and still are trying to push vaccines on cohorts that absolutely do not need them (see numerous EU countries who are not doing this).
On top of that, they managed to convince many US citizens that vaccines prevented transmission as part of their efforts to force vaccines on everyone. Go check some past HN threads for a wild ride!
Bonus points are awarded for obesity being a major risk factor that we’ve done 0 to address post Covid despite the absolutely massive benefits we’d see from it - Id wager far outstripping masking or vaccinating. Externalities for thee but not for me, I guess.
Did they ignore them, or were they just not devaluing the lives of the sick and elderly? If 10,000,000 people are dead that would otherwise be living, standing up and saying "but they were old or fat!" has a kind of asshole sting to it, no?
> They then and still are trying to push vaccines on cohorts that absolutely do not need them (see numerous EU countries who are not doing this).
Vaccines aren't just for the people that get them. They are for the people around them as well. I'm a perfectly healthy 35 year old, but I visit my 90 year old grandfather often, and live in a community with many elderly. If the vaccine makes me less likely to transmit, that's good for everyone, whether or not it matters much to me in isolation.
> On top of that, they managed to convince many US citizens that vaccines prevented transmission as part of their efforts to force vaccines on everyone.
They do tho. Maybe not 100%, but to a degree they certainly do.
> Bonus points are awarded for obesity being a major risk factor that we’ve done 0 to address post Covid despite the absolutely massive benefits we’d see from it - Id wager far outstripping masking or vaccinating. Externalities for thee but not for me, I guess.
Not even sure what you're saying here.
Not devaluing the lives of the elderly is implicitly devaluing the lives of the not elderly. This is a trade off that was given almost no consideration in the greater (US) discussion.
> They do tho. Maybe not 100%, but to a degree they certainly do.
The degree is extremely important here. Without a certain level of transmission prevented this benefit becomes nonexistent. See grandpa enough times and he’ll catch it. That you don’t know the degree but still felt safe seeing him is very concerning and you were likely mislead.
> Not even sure what you're saying here.
Choosing to focus on masks and vaccines while ignoring obesity removes are principled arguments for the former. The latter has benefits both against future pandemics of all kinds as well as broad public health benefits. Thus, anyone not raising hell about how fat America is while advocating for forced vaccination and mask wearing is playing politics and not really interested in public health outcomes.
Like you, people claimed forced vaccinations were justified by externalities - but the same logic was not applied to forced weight loss.
It did though. We are going back to normal for the most part, despite the continuing risk to the elderly. Early lockdown was for everyone since very little was known about the disease.
> Choosing to focus on masks and vaccines while ignoring obesity removes are principled arguments for the former.
It's an obvious matter of practicality. Masks are easy and fast and will, statistically, do more good than a country wide weight loss drive. Would it be better long term if the country was fit? Yeah, for far more reasons than COVID. That's not practical though, as evidenced by the governments pre-existing desire and failure to make that happen.
> Like you, people claimed forced vaccinations were justified by externalities - but the same logic was not applied to forced weight loss.
Which is completely consistent with the state of the world pre-covid?
* X stabs Y, and Y immediately dies. Simplest case, X is responsible for Y's death.
* X stabs Y as part of a surgery. Y was predicted to have 2 months to live, but instead dies on the operating table. X did not murder Y, even though they were the cause of Y's death occurring on that specific day, rather than 2 months later.
* X stabs Y as part of a mugging, and Y immediately dies. Coincidentally, Y was predicted to have 2 months to live, but instead dies in the mugging. X did murder Y, even though it was the same difference in total lifespan as the previous example than 2 months later, because the intent matters.
* X stabs Y as part of a mugging, but it only requires some light stitches. While Y is driving to the emergency room, they are killed in a car accident. X would be liable for causing injury, but wouldn't be liable for the death, because it was an unrelated coincidence.
* X stabs Y, and Y later dies of blood loss at the hospital after refusing treatment for religious reasons. The defense argues that this should be counted as manslaughter instead of murder, because Y's refusal of treatment breaks the chain of causality between the action and the eventual outcome. The judge disagrees, as "defendants must take their victims as they find them."
These are all hypotheticals based on my layman's understanding of the law, except for the last one, which occurred in the case of a Jehovah's Witness who refused blood transfusions for religious reasons [0]. This became more of a ramble than I intended, but I definitely agree that causation is tricky, and "cause" could be any of "action with a causal link", "immediately preceding cause", or "deviation from a just world that initiated a causal chain", and would lead to vastly different statistics depending on the definition.
https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...
> An early response to Covid-19, including borders’ controls and a strong test and trace capacity, could improve epidemiological surveillance and minimize excess mortality, with stringent and lengthy lockdowns not providing a significant benefit.
And the part about a strong test and trace capability is obviously nonsense. That didn't work in any of the countries that tried, except previous perhaps in China where the government is able to exercise a level of totalitarian control worse than any virus.
It's disappointing that this kind of unrealistic garbage makes it though peer review.
As for the cited part of the conclusion, this is silly in practice. Obviously not letting in any infectious case would be much better, but when that happens, which always does in practice, the stringent lockdowns are only solution left until you get everyone vaccinated. So it's like comparing apple to orange.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
Data comes from: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676
[1] https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-track... [2] https://elifesciences.org/articles/69336.pdf [3] https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/vaccines/vaccines-10-01702...
All in most of the impact of Covid 19 so far seems to be 84% disabled, 12% excess dying and 4% directly dying from the acute infection. Most of the impact is after the acute infection has passed.
1 in 400 people are (estimated) excess deaths during the pandemic. This is not the same thing as claiming that all of them were in fact killed by the disease itself.
An incredibly novel infectious disease that kills older people at an intensely meaningful rate is clearly the driver here.
For 2016 that's 1 in 1300 people in the US, a first world nation with world class medical infrastructure.
I wonder what's the worldwide figure? And what % of it overlaps with that 1 in 400?
Even when doctors and hospitals weren't enforcing it, many people were putting off non-critical medical care because they didn't want to go into the hospital or doctor's office and risk getting exposed.
Fewer people being treated, and fewer elective procedures being performed means fewer chances for error.
One exception of course would be ER/ICU staff who were so stressed, overworked, and understaffed that I wouldn't doubt if the number of mistakes in those places increased to some extent.
Of the countries that I have looked at, Sweden is perhaps the most interesting, as the figures tracked closely together until the beginning of 2021, and then diverged rapidly over the next few months.
Even so, it saw much higher mortality rates than its neighbours.
Did they?
https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/1596815870676041729
Actual studies of the COVID death rate in the Nordics all show Sweden having a much worse mortality rate.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14034948211047...
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/140349482098026...
[2] https://jogh.org/2022/jogh-12-05017
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron...
Another significant factor was the complete elimination of flu as a byproduct of COVID countermeasures (zero recorded flu cases or deaths for about a year). Flu came back in from overseas (with a vengeance) when the restrictions lifted.
10 people die every year per 1000.
During this covid it had been 11 people per thousand per year.
Of course an almost unquantifiable and continuing tragedy for families everywhere.
You’d expect that you’d see a reduction in deaths over the next ~10 years (when those people would have died from other causes).
"simply"?
Not meant to pick on you, this is a common thing I see when certain topics are discussed but it does not benefit the discussion at all.
This is a leaky medium for communication. It’s fast and casual and only text. Over analyzing each word is fine, but if you don’t like the word choice just move on. Trying to educate people to communicate how you want them to is a losing battle.
Also this node of the conversation is about data and analytics and now pedantry more than the underlying topic of death.
But we might be coming with different expectations. This might be a serious discussion or it might be a casual internet discussion. Do you agree that if it's serious then people should be more careful with their words?
And if it's casual then are you complaining that I've strayed off topic?
I think I get what the parent comment was going for (i.e., that it only moved the date of death a little bit, as opposed to how the death of an otherwise healthy child would imply a date of death that moved a lot), but it's a weird way to say it.
Does it upset you the UK government values a year of human life at about 30,000 GBP?
It was an invitation for clarification about what you meant.
How would you distinguish Covid from, say, murder, which also accelerates deaths by X years?
It's true that if the death rate is higher now, then the death rate may be lower in the future, but I'm not sure that's a useful way of thinking. If the death rate were 100% now, then the death rate would be 0% in the future. It all balances out, right? Except, that's not the way it works, because the dead never get their years or lives back.
We're all mortal and will eventually die sooner or later. But in most cases, later is much better than sooner.
I'd also mention that you probably wouldn't appreciate having 30,000X GBP stolen from you.
Sure, years of life are lost, but what kind of years? Someone in an old age home near the end of their life dying isn’t equivalent to a young child dying.
You can make good public health policy without measuring the gains and costs of any particular policy.
Saying “were going to save every single life no matter what” is a path to ruin.
> Sure, years of life are lost, but what kind of years?
No, I understand your point very well now. It is what I always thought it was.
Someday you may feel differently. If you live long enough, you may finally understand. But then it'll be too late, and the generations younger than you will also want to send you on "Logan's Run".
Usually you need to argue for a better theory than what's being done, not make quip remarks about a movie.
I'm not even arguing, either in good or bad faith.
How do you argue with someone who places no value on the lives of older people? My intention was, and still is, to end this conversation.
I suspected that you had a certain view, so I prompted you to clarify your view, and you did indeed clarify your view:
> Sure, years of life are lost, but what kind of years? Someone in an old age home near the end of their life dying isn’t equivalent to a young child dying.
By your own words, you devalue the lives of older people.
I think it was good for everyone to see what you really believe, but I don't expect to be able to change your mind, so there's nothing to argue.
The only "personal attack" in this thread was:
> You’d make a poor healthcare statistician getting upset over words like that.
Then again you will have excess deaths because of mental health problems that covid causes, medical problems because medical care was not available and etc. These would not equalize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_potential_life_lost
Perhaps a more useful metric, since so many more older people died from Covid.
People asking for estimates that fit their agenda is quite predictable, but those estimates aren't very useful. Anyway, your point stays, ignoring the huge amount of estimates produced, and asking for them later is quite a bad posture.
And Africa as a whole practically unaffected.
Also, largely these countries are much hotter and more aerated / outdoors places. So, comparisons are not particularly helpful.
Confirmed: 4009 • Upper bound, 95%: -22,912 • Central: -127,918 • Lower bound: -246,089
(due to say, traffic accidents, work accidents, other respiratory diseases that were also suppresed by increased hygiene, etc).
The end result; overall lower rate of death than usual, and a chunk of the deaths that did occur due to COVID.
So you catch covid, recover, then get hit by a bus. Covid death.
Meanwhile some countries report next to no deaths, also clearly not correct. The reported data is clearly close to worthless and yet it suits too many people's purposes to use it.
The "got hit by bus after positive test" group is so small it's negligible. E.g. in my country, there have been more covid deaths in two weeks than traffic accidents during the whole year.
Because of the variation in testing practices, excess deaths is the only reliable statistic we have now.
"You are asked to start with the immediate, direct cause of death on line Ia, then to go back through the sequence of events or conditions that led to death on subsequent lines, until you reach the one that started the fatal sequence."
Seems unlikely that someone getting hit by a bus would be listed as a Covid death. I would be interested in your source.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/public-health-england-death-da...
“ 1) A death in a person with a laboratory-confirmed positive COVID-19 and either: died within 60 days of the first specimen date or died more than 60 days after the first specimen date, only if COVID-19 is mentioned on the death certificate”
Implying that in the first instance, covid does not need to appear anywhere on the death certificate and it will still be counted.
The definition listed here is used only by the Health Security Agency (formerly Public Health England) to provide a useful point in time metric for the severity of the pandemic across a range of data sources. The benefit is that the data may be available faster than the official ONS stat, allowing for earlier interventions.
With information like this it’s always important to dig deeper into the context of who, what, when, and why, rather than taking it at face value. Especially when in this case both the HSA and ONS quite openly and transparently explain both their criteria and reasoning.
All else being equal it seems a decent proxy. If you died of an illness within 60 days after testing positive for COVID, it’s almost certainly a contributing factor if not the main cause.
Here we just state "deaths within 28 days..." no qualifier. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
But at the bottom 'developed by the Health Security Agency' so it's likley using the definition that doesn't specify the cause of death on the death certificate.
That's the #1 result on Google for uk coronavirus deaths.
Strangely, the two measures only diverged from July 2020. It could be that:
- the initial strict lockdowns prevented deaths from more diseases
- some later deaths were caused by COVID indirectly (without it being registered as the cause)
Do you have any evidence at all that comes close to suggest this hypothesis, let alone substantiate it?
Edit: found an article investigating it: https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...
> An early response to Covid-19, including borders’ controls and a strong test and trace capacity, could improve epidemiological surveillance and minimize excess mortality, with stringent and lengthy lockdowns not providing a significant benefit.
The main ones appear to be a reduction in health services, with cause unstated. That's probably largely due to people being pulled into dealing with the pandemic itself and not enough resources to go around? And then it also raises "The region also suffered increased levels of unemployment, poverty and food insecurity due to the pandemic, further undermining public health, the report said"
>voluntary lockdowns
Who's saying voluntary?
>The report – which covered Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – also found that about 420 million children were out of school due to the pandemic and its related control measures.
>“Given the cultural and social context of South Asia, the suspension of these services is deepening inequalities and is likely to lead to an increase in the number of maternal and neonatal deaths”
This parts of the article specifically say the closing of schools is likely to cause an increase in deaths. And, again, the closing of schools is a lockdown measure, not something COVID did
The article says that there was a drop on treatment of malnutrition and puts a number 228,000 of deaths on that cause, and in poorer countries this kind of things (along with family violence) are found primarily on schools by teachers. Which obviously can't happen when schools are closed
>"The region also suffered increased levels of unemployment, poverty and food insecurity due to the pandemic, further undermining public health, the report said"
Increased unemployment is a direct consequence of mandatory lockdowns
How much of that happens at school and how much is separate? The article doesn't say.
Not to mention, closing schools doesn't mean that the government(s) couldn't provide healthcare services in other ways.
If I lock my dining room and starve, I didn't starve because I locked the room. I starved because I stopped eating.
> Increased unemployment is a direct consequence of mandatory lockdowns
It's also a direct consequence of everyone stopping spending money or going anywhere on their own accord, because nobody wants to catch a deadly disease.
It certainly seems probable that some deaths are directly attributable to lockdowns. This article doesn't give me much idea how many that would be though.
Increase in police brutality https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/covid19-lo...
Delay or avoidance of medical care https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6936a4.htm
This is without counting the huge economic downturn it caused and the pause on developing of small children
Extended strict lockdowns were an incredible mistake, I didn't even think it was controversial
Overall, suicide rates in most countries either dipped or remained the same. [0][1]
Whether or not police brutality saw an increase, its effect on mortality was negligible at population levels.
As for the delay or avoidance of medical care, which did have statistical impact, that has been as severe in places that didn't have severe lockdowns as for places that did. Turns out if the medical system and hospitals become overwhelmed with a novel disease that has an effect on their ability to perform regular treatment too.
Very, very few places did extended strict lockdowns.
[0] https://www.statnews.com/2021/11/16/the-pandemic-didnt-incre...
[1] https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/research-policy/...
There's not a whole lot you can do to alter the effect a virus has on a human body (at least not immediately after discovering it), but you might be able to learn a lot from the effects of various types of government intervention, what helped and what hurt, and make plans that reduce the negative effects the next time action is needed.
What we should be dealing with is the millions, maybe even a billion worldwide that will have long-covid for the rest of their miserable existence.
They're alive but the quality of life is just gone, likely forever.
We saw this with the original covid, SARS-COV-1 in 2003, many never recovered.
What? I don't think there is any data to suggest that 1/8 of the world population has long-COVID or that they have a miserable existence. That's quite judgmental to say about someone also.
> They're alive but the quality of life is just gone, likely forever.
Forever? How do we know? So many people recovered from long-COVID. Everyone is different, there is no data to suggest that people will have lasting symptoms forever.
Not going to get into a pointless argument here about it, there are already many studies showing at least 10% of people who get covid now have long-covid and it's decimated the workforce.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-data-shows-long-covid...
Long-Covid deniers might be the worst of all because the suffering is very real and they don't "get it" until it's their turn, and then it's too late.
For people with long covid we're going to deny it's real, deny healthcare, blame them for their financial consequences, give no support, then offer suicide.
Nice new epithet.
> Convenient isn't it that they still don't have a test to detect and prove long-covid, forget treating it.
This sounds like you're a conspiracy theorist. Not only are you condemning everyone by making up a new epithet, you're couching it all in your conspiracy theory that they're hiding evidence of long covid?