Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

He makes fundamental mistakes right at the beginning.

E.g.: he quotes something like "40% excess deaths due to COVID, as certified by a doctor"

And then claims: "hence the other 60% are not COVID related".

That's not what that means! The other 60% is deaths that are EITHER due to COVID, but not certified by a doctor OR due to other causes, including indirect deaths due to the pandemic.

Regarding certified deaths: Especially later in the pandemic there were lots of people taking the disease less seriously. Testing rates dropped. Fewer people bothered going to hospital. Symptoms were less obvious but still causing deaths. Some guy on a breathing tube dying is obviously due to COVID, but some woman keeling over at home because their heart couldn't take repeated mild infections is not so obvious.

Regarding indirect causes: There were also lots of excess deaths due to elective surgeries being delayed and preventative healthcare being put off. Hospitals were overwhelmed, and many procedures were simply unavailable. These are indirectly caused by COVID, but would not be "certified as COVID-caused by a doctor".

Not to mention suicides due to lockdown isolation, work from home. My neighbour killed himself because he was a very social person stuck at home for a year and a half!

The correlations he lists are also not proper evidence. The healthcare issues due to delayed elective surgeries would accumulate and take 1-2 years to show a noticeable effect, coinciding with the vaccination rollout schedule.

To get a scientifically valid statistical result, you'd have to do some sort of multivariate analysis that doesn't just look at an aggregate graph for an entire nation, but breaks down vaccination rates and excess deaths by smaller regions.

You'd then have to show that increased vaccinations cause increased deaths, independently of other factors such as the time since the pandemic started (and hospitals got backlogged), infection rates, etc...

I'm glad you articulated exactly what I was thinking while watching this video. It felt like lousy statistics the whole time.

There are lies, there are damned lies, and then there are statistics.

The Australian data he talks about are not so clearly declared but 40% excess deaths due to COVID means that from all the excess death 40% had COVID as a possible factor not as the definitive cause of death.

"hence the other 60% are not COVID related" is the correct interpretation because its the interpretation of the doctors that looked at each individual death.

This is perfectly normal and its obvious that many death will fall into the wrong group for various reasons. For example a car crash death is likely going to be "not COVID related" even thou someone could very much have crashed their car due to COVID.

These edge cases however can go both ways and since these always existed in all the data collected it should not be so relevant to monitor the trend. And the trend is obvious and unexpected. We see more people die than the average and we should see less after years of excess death.

Also your assumption that the excess death (not attributed to COVID) is actuality due to COVID, is perfectly valid and he never says that this isn't a possibility. The key point is NO ONE KNOWS or seems to want to figure it out.

If people actually die from COVID in a way doctors do not attribute it to COVID that would be very very important to know and investigate.

Same with all other pandemic related reasons you mention. They are all possible but again the problem is that we do not know.

The government does investigate these things, and many of these effects are well-known... to epidemiologists.

For example, when there was that Swine Flu pandemic, the ratio of reported flu deaths versus excess deaths for that year was something like 1:5 or even higher. I read a scientific paper to that effect, which was funded by a government study. This is standard stuff.

In Australia, we had government bodies putting out warnings saying that deaths due to suicides caused by the lockdown and similar pandemic-caused health issues might exceed the deaths directly caused by COVID!

This is not some secret coverup, it was on the nightly news being announced by someone working for the government.

Another government body was saying that alcoholism-related deaths were up as well because people were drinking more during the lockdown.

Etc...

You are completely out of the loop on the data it seems. If you have some free time 1h or 2h and actually look at the data you would know this is not about suicide increases, lockdown effects, delays medical screenings etc. etc..

The excess deaths are higher than the expected effects of all these known factors together and the correlation to onset/end of the events do not line up. You cant explain ongoing excess death globally due to lockdowns when lockdowns where very different by region and have long been lifted a while ago. No one questions that lockdowns had negative effects, horrible effects like suicide but we are talking about a 10% increase suicides and single digit increase in cancer death, durg abuse and similar things that we do have a very good idea about why these increased but it just does not add up to 15% or 20% excess death. The excess deaths are off by a factor of 2 or more in many places, in other words we have theories and reasonable understanding for halve the excess death death.

The numbers not recorded as "COVID related" clearly are. This leads people to falsely conclude that the pandemic is over, when clearly this is not the case.

I feel like we're ALL in the position of the indigenous people of the new world, exposed to European diseases for the first time, and even with modern medicine, I don't think we're likely to fair much better than they did over the coming years.

So the official data is wrong? Significantly more people die from COVID than attributed to COVID? If that is the case you should agree with the video author because that would definitely need an official large scale investigation.

+ this would then actually mean that currently in many places people die from COVID at a similar rates as at the peaks of the COVID waves despite all the progress in threatening COVID despite the milder variants and despite the fact that hospitals are not maxed out.

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