Expensive energy may have killed more Europeans than Covid-19 last winter | Hacker News Reader

Expensive energy may have killed more Europeans than Covid-19 last winter

economist.com

242 pointsmfiguiere195 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20230510215922/https://www.econom...

This analysis is incredibly flawed. It's face-palm levels of statistical incompetence here.

> High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems.

Cardiac and respiratory problems you say! Hmmm, I wonder if there's a virus circulating that turns lungs into swiss cheese....or if it causes massive cardiac stress and damage too.

The author's presumption about how energy prices can lead to excess deaths hinges upon a mechanism that COVID-19 also affects. It's not correlation: it's causation. COVID-19 causes respiratory and cardiac problems. They did not even attempt to address this fact!

So then, they say "well some of these death's weren't caused by COVID-19." Ok sure. But how many of those folks who died from "the cold" actually died of hypothermia? Out of the ones that died from cardiac or repository distress, how many had prior COVID-19 infections? Were they recovered? If they recovered, was it full or did they have lingering, permanent long-COVID symptoms? Because we know there's a causal relationship, it really isn't hard to make the next step of inference to understand that this disease will be a very strong cofounding variable in those non-COVID-19 attributed excess deaths.

tl;dr This article is BS because it ignores the causal relationship that COVID-19 has on mechanism by which higher energy prices could plausibly lead to increased mortality.

They have at least attempted to compare these excess deaths with a model of Covid excess deaths (although models are always wrong to varying degrees)

The most interesting thing to me is how younger ages who previously haven't been affected much by Covid seem to have suffered this past winter https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

at least from people around me in Germany "younger people" seem to have been more affected by bad Covid cases then at any time before

like in my extended family/friend cycle Covid cases where people needed multipel weeks to recover from where rare before this winter, but not rare this winter

but due to changes in how Covid was handled in general I'm wouldn't be surprised if less then half the cases ended up in any Covid statistics

through then concluding from your personal environment to all of Germany is query a far stretch

I’ve observed the same in my peer group. There’s a reason Instill wear an N95 whenever I’m out and about and it isn’t totally impractical.

My personal pet (non scientific) theory is that repeated infections over-sensitize the immune system, almost like an allergic reaction or something. Many of them seem To be on their 3rd or 4th rodeo at this point. Comments like “the first two times it was just a cold, this time it was like a really really bad flu” are common.

Do you have a theory for why COVID would behave in a novel way with respect to worsening on repeat infection? I have not heard of this type of behavior for other viruses. In general there seems to be a willingness to grant COVID special powers among viruses, e.g. the whole “maybe natural immunity doesn’t work at all!” saga. But maybe this does happen for other viruses and I just haven’t heard of it?

Weakening the immune system is not an uncommon property of viruses and Coronaviruses are know to not engender long term, durable immunity. So, with COVID, what we have is not “special powers,” but a combination of both qualities in a more (at the population-level) virulent disease. Natural immunity for COVID works pretty much the same as it does for other Coronaviruses (you can get the same one multiple times per year), but that’s problematic given the disease’s overall severity and propensity to damage people’s immune systems in a way that makes them susceptible to other illnesses (see the recent spate of post-COVID fungal infections).

Dengue is such a virus: repeated infections get worse.

Quoting: 'repeated infections over-sensitize the immune system, almost like an allergic reaction or something."

Try the 'R' in the (Strain-) Sequency (RRRRR) maybe it matches your thought (not an expert...) regards...

> My personal pet (non scientific) theory is that repeated infections over-sensitize the immune system, almost like an allergic reaction or something.

There have been a few variants that have a markedly change in their ability to spread and also their severity. They might be hitting people differently. I mean, if the same person is getting infected multiple times with carrying degrees of severity, something is changing in the infection.

With every mRNA vaccination, the risk of getting (at least) COVID19 rises more.

Just look into the studies of 22 and 23.

But similarly, COVID-19 studies during last winter may not account for the increased respiratory problems due to high energy prices? It's confounded both ways.

The data shows that there are excess deaths beyond what can be directly attributed to Covid-19, that Covid-19 deaths are themselves not strongly correlated with energy prices, and that excess deaths in 2022-2023 were moderately correlated with energy prices. So we can be somewhat confident that Covid-19 is not the primary causal pathway to excess deaths in 2022-2023.

The worst problem is that the author concluded that there is a causal path between the high prices and excess deaths, which they absolutely did not do enough work to justify. For example, I don't see any longitudinal analysis here, nor do I see the effects of weather (temperature, humidity, cold snaps, high winds) accounted for. If your main causal hypothesis is that physically being cold caused the excess deaths, then something like 5th percentile temperature, events like "cold snap below -5 C for 3 or more days", etc. should be strongly correlated with excess deaths, after controlling for energy prices and baseline seasonality over several years.

Consider that temperature might actually be the underlying causal factor for both high prices and excess deaths! That is: cold winter causes more deaths, and cold winter also causes higher prices.

Maybe also having a warmer climate is correlated with being less dependent on Russian gas for heat due to geopolitical factors. That would be an interesting article in its own right, but it's not quite as exciting of a headline.

These points should be incredibly obvious to anyone writing for The Economist, and the fact that this wasn't even mentioned makes me think this article is more than just "incompetence" but outright bad faith.

> As wholesale energy prices fall and temperatures rise, the immediate threat may be over, but it is clear Mr Putin’s energy weapon was deadly.

Ugh, does it get any cornier?

I feel like readers ought to start demanding data and source code along with allegedly "data-driven" articles like this. That way at least I can do my own analysis using theirs as a starting point. Their list of sources at the bottom is not exactly something I can work with:

> Chart sources: The Economist’s excess-deaths tracker; Copernicus; HEPI

In any case, junk articles like this are exactly the reason I haven't subscribed to The Economist in years. Blogs written by actual economists seem to be the only place to find any sober analysis nowadays.

Handily forgets that energy prices (and all the others) were shooting upwards before Putin, the Economist is terrible.

Electricity prices started trending upwards the summer before the war started, so when the pipeline output got reduced due to "technical issues".

if your main conclusion is

lower temperature = higher deaths

then you should be pro-anthropogenic climate change as you would see it as saving lives.

With similar excess deaths in Australia, I feel like attributing these to power prices is a bit of a stretch.

>> High energy prices can cost lives. They discourage people from heating their homes properly, and living in cold conditions raises the risk of cardiac and respiratory problems.

I wonder if this assertion is even true. Cold conditions have been shown to be beneficial in some ways (increase metabolism, increase in brown fat which burns more calories than regular fat, etc). I'm sure there are limits to this, but IIRC Europe ended up having a surprisingly warm winter this year.

My guess is it isn't cold itself that kills, but the effects of living in a cold, and damp, environment.

Take the UK for example, many houses are over 100 years old, made of brick and little insulation. Even before energy prices went crazy, during the winter you'd be paying hundreds of pounds a month for heating and some parts of the house would barely reach 20c. In most parts of the UK, temperatures below freezing are rare so it's probably +5C or similar outside at that time. And its an island that rains a lot, so combine that with 90% humidity and you have a rather high dew point.

Now back to the energy prices. Gas prices in the UK are around 3x what they were before COVID, and electricity prices around 5x - and let's not even start about other living costs. So you do as the media says and try to save money and energy by turning down the thermostat. Maybe you also turn off the radiator in the spare bedroom, and try to be smart by sealing up drafty windows.

This means your cold and damp home will be closer to the dew point and is going to be less ventilated (forced air heating or ventilation is not a thing in the UK; you ventilate by opening windows), which will to lead to more mold and fungus, and we have something which causes health issues. The winter in the UK was colder than normal too, with more days below freezing than usual.

(I'm from the UK, but live somewhere colder now, but as the humidity is so low during winter and houses are insulated properly, mold is not a thing here)

This doesn't seem like a sound argument to me. Applied more generally, it quickly turns a bunch of statistics into nonsense.

E.g. the same argument could be made about COVID deaths themselves. They didn't die because of COVID, they died because they were obese, or smokers, or diabetic, or old, etc. Hell, you could argue that nobody died of COVID at all. They all died from failing to properly isolate themselves. Exposure to other people is causally related to getting COVID.

People don't die from heart attacks, they die from poor diet and exercise. People don't die of cancer, they die from eating red meat or not taking enough D3 or whatever. People don't die of gunshots, they die from poverty and poor mental health.

The cold is the proximate cause of death here. They have a risk factor from COVID (or diabetes, or age, or any of the other crapload of comorbidities related to hypothermia), which made them vulnerable to dying from the cold. They might have survived if they hadn't had COVID, but they also might have survived if they were younger, or in better shape, or didn't have a different health condition.

> Applied more generally, it quickly turns a bunch of statistics [published in popular magazines] into nonsense.

Well done! Remember that.

You've identified a lot of complexity. But the answer is not to throw up your hands and declare everything equally unknowable, it's to do the hard work to figure out what's actually going on. That's not something we can do behind our keyboards right now, that doesn't mean their isn't a correct, knowable answer.

I'm not sure what your point is here. You're trying to make some kind of reductio ad absurdum argument about what, statistics in general? Causal analysis is bad because causation is complicated at the intersection of social science and medicine? All models are wrong and therefore all models are useless?

The primary absurdity here is that the author didn't even do an acceptable correlational study, yet presented a specific and strong causal conclusion. The author failed to establish any causality for anything at all, other than weakly ruling out Covid as a notable cause of excess death in Germany.

The author's hypothesis is that people being cold (due to high energy prices) is the cause, but they absolutely do not manage to establish even the faintest hint of a valid causal argument to support that hypothesis.

Claiming the cold is the proximate cause of death while you’re dying of COVID seems like a poor analysis

> if there's a virus circulating that turns lungs into swiss cheese

Oh come off it, it wasn't doing that anymore last year. Almost 100% of the population had been vaccinated, recovered from infection, or most likely both in 2022 so for most it wasn't even as bad as a flu.

Your medical analysis is badly flawed. When people are cold this causes peripheral vasoconstriction, thus raising blood pressure. Not a problem for healthy young people, but it increases the risk of major adverse cardiac events for frail elderly people. This is common knowledge in the field.

The difference is 5 mmHG which idk if medically significant.

I thought it was rather confusing how people with 2+ conditions died from covid(?) You could also not count them but it would be equally wrong. How hard does one have to sneeze to blame a traffic fatality on covid? It can never be statistically significant with so many people in bed and working from hone.

If the heating bill would be the problem we would all have died?

The article is as wrong as all the others, perhaps more so but I cant tell? can I?

Would people with Covid complications still have died if they had heat?

Btw, the title means that: this past winter, more people died due to "expensive energy" than due to Covid-19.

It's not the case that more people died last winter due to "expensive energy" than due to Covid-19 in total (see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51235105).

A very important detail! Deaths from covid are way way down mainly because of vaccines.

mRNA vaccine creation is humanity's most impressive technology. We'd be absolutely screwed right now if we didn't have this tech. (Or, more accurately: a lot more people would be dead otherwise).

I don't really think so. Omicron is what did it. I think in Africa only 24% received at least one dose, and Africa is not a giant heaping pile of covid19 bodies.

If I recall correctly (its possible I do not), the latest booster is for BA-5, which was effectively extinct by the time the booster came out. Why its extinct is important: the existing variants had immune escape over BA-5.

The age of the average African is significantly younger than the rest of the world. There's a lot of variables to account for, you'd need a proper study, not just a single data point, to determine if omicron is significantly less deadly than older COVID variants.

As for GP's claim that vaccines saved a lot of lives, that's very well supported at this point https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/two-years-covid-v....

That's a continental average. Rates varied (June 2022) from nearly 72% in Rwanda to near zero in neighboring Burundi. You are unfortunately parroting a bad/malicious over-generalization.

This is common sense and goes without saying. GP does not need to recite the litany about the fact that things are different in different parts of Africa. We're aware.

> You are unfortunately parroting a bad/malicious over-generalization.

Yawn.

There's no scientific evidence to support this. Even in the Pfizer RCTs, there were more deaths in the vaccinated group than in the control group (but this wasn't statistically significant, as the overall sample size wasn't large enough to make a conclusion WRT death reduction).

Please don't post this nonsense "no scientific evidence"? There's overwhelming evidence that mRNA vaccines significantly reduced hospitalisations and deaths.

Just for example: https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj-2021-069761

While the mRNA vaccines were great and developed a few months faster, the non mRNA vaccines also worked quite well. At least the J&J vaccine did (although they gave fewer doses and therefore it didn't get as strong a protection).

For the initial variants, sure. But those have long since been replaced with much milder variants, closely resembling a mild cold for most. How are you able to attribute the reduction in deaths for this winter compared to the previous winter to vaccines? We had vaccines in the previous winter too.

It's technically also not true that people were killed by "Expensive energy".

Makes me wonder how many people have died because of terrible headlines...

That reminds me of the time I saw a local newspaper with the front page headline

"Fatal distraction kills driver"

But with the irony of a red square covering 80% of the page, as a Foxtel ad. Lemme see if I can find it..

It has been similarly speculated that shutdown of nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster has caused more deaths than the disaster itself, due to rise in energy costs:

https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/11/07/was-shutting-japan...

I mostly find The Economist to be propaganda, for example they try to frame energy vs covid because they always want to disparage "green energy" and covid safety measures. That's their bias, I find it to be really grating but hey to each their own. What I would have liked to have seen in this article was a breakdown of the causes of death.

It seems like the implication is that energy costs caused people to freeze to death, or at least keep the temperature low and... get more sick? I guess? Not sure. But since energy prices are tied to everything else, how much of these excess deaths were knock-on effects of high energy prices affecting the costs of goods and subsequently human behavior? I would be curious to see a breakdown of the effects because it's hard for me to believe that people are just freezing to death because they can't afford $100/month extra on their electricity bills. Maybe this is true, but I would like to see a breakdown of the causes of death for each person.

One of the things that came to mind is the idea that let's say there's some percentage of people on the verge of suicide on any given day. Could an extra $100/mo on their utility bill, or the inflation from high energy prices, have enough of an effect that they kill themselves?

I think this would be a more interesting analysis than "herp derp energy production is more important than covid safety", especially when the easy argument against the effect of energy costs on an individual is that expensive energy is only relevant when consumers pay for it directly. If the state subsidizes energy production then (assuming no blackouts) nobody is going to freeze to death (which they hinted at in their article, but didn't realize the end conclusion that a nationalized energy sector makes energy costs largely irrelevant to the individual).

Personally I don't really care either way, but I think this post sucks and I don't see why it's so high up.

> because they always want to disparage "green energy" and covid safety measures.

This is simply not a true reflection of the voice of the economist, which has been climate-real (in terms of aligned with the scientific evidence) for more than 25 years

a) even if I grant you your timeline, that's still decades of delay and denial

b) they have still been championing people like Bjorn Lomborg within that timeframe.

c) they appear to have become more US culture war aligned recently as their readership changed which is obviously a step backwards on climate (and COVID)

your comment is still a gross misrepresentation of the economist 'voice'. I've been a semi-regular reader for at least 20 years, for instance, and have never seen or heard reference to Bjorn Lomborg.

For example, I just logged in and searched for him - there are 5 articles he appears in since 2001.

I struggle to find any sort of COVID skepticism or 'behind the science' viewpoint with their reporting, frankly I don't think this is true unless you can point to an example of it, and as a Doctor I am acutely sensitive to bad reporting on this.

I don't particularly understand the economist hate that periodically appears here, except to acknowledge that there are different viewpoints, and unless you're radically one way or the other as it pertains to the US culture war which threatens every day to engulf normal discourse everywhere - a society in a phase change either to something greater or to a race to the bottom.

I'm not saying The Economist is batshit insane enough to still be pushing Trump style lies about climate change.

But it's an absolute fact that Trump and Putin only managed to get away with such insanities because for decades the right wing, after initially accepting climate science and starting to put measures in place, got bought by fossil fuel interests.

The Economist was and still is part of that.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/06/23/t...

Here's an article from 2022 and yeah it's not Trump level "China Hoax" stuff, but it's still clearly worrying that investing in gas isn't attractive enough, as if that's the big problem we face.

Similarly the current article. Expensive energy kills apparently, so what's the cheapest source of Winter heating? Wind powered heat pumps in well insulated homes? Probably not worth mentioning, just underline that without Russian gas we die.

> Similarly the current article. Expensive energy kills apparently, so what's the cheapest source of Winter heating? Wind powered heat pumps in well insulated homes? Probably not worth mentioning, just underline that without Russian gas we die.

Bingo.

The Economist doesn't do climate denial, they just do concern trolling wrt green energy. "Oh man look at how supply doesn't keep up with demand during the day" and they usually don't acknowledge that market incentives will lead to solutions like storage and arbitrage, because the user is meant to be left with the impression that green energy is a half-baked solution that wont work with our grid.

Nothing in this article is non-factual, but their primary purpose is as a propaganda piece. There isn't much intellectual value.

There are quite a lot of articles about climate change on The Economist and as far as I know none of them denies it.

But of course because they posted something that you don't agree with, they must be propaganda.

Climate change denial has moved beyond explicitly denying its existence at this point. At least the kind that can sway otherwise reasonably intelligent people.

> It's not happening

> Okay maybe it's happening but we didn't cause it

> Okay maybe it's happening and maybe we did cause it but we shouldn't do anything about it because insert easily debunkable bullshit about electric vehicles and renewables being impractical or whataboutism involving other countries here. <== WE ARE HERE

> Okay it's happening and we caused it but it's too late to do anything now so lets just keep the status quo.

And where did the Economist do this? When was the Economist ever denying climate change?

Does their glowing obituary of Nigel Lawson count:

> His frequent presence on the bbc, arguing against the reality of man-made climate change or, alternatively, that a bit of warming was desirable, depending on the day, outraged environmentalists and scientists alike.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/04/04/nigel-lawson-wa...

Seems like no, it does not count, because they're explicitly saying he was wrong:

> the reality of man-made climate change

Someone can question the reality of something that isn't real. So they've not even managed that low bar you've set for them.

We have to assume their opinion on this. We know it outrages environmentalists and scientists, but apparently the economists opinion is not relevant or worth stating explicitly?

I mean, it's an obituary. They don't really need to spend an additional paragraph about their opinion on climate change, given that they have articles that are about climate change all over the rest of the magazine. The idea that they're secretly climate change deniers because they don't spend as much time on it as you'd like in an obituary is honestly slightly crazy.

Propaganda != something I don't like

It's propaganda because the primary goal of the economist is to convince you of something (that the status quo/neoliberalism should be enforced). Propaganda also doesn't mean nothing in this article was non-factual.

Mother Jones also has a lot of 100% factual articles, but their main goal as a propaganda outlet is to convince people to become socialists. I don't think that belongs on HN either, even though I love Mother Jones.

Is there value in posting a pure propaganda piece to HN? I don't think so, not unless the point of the post is to practice media literacy by looking at propaganda academically. I think it would be more interesting to post something more scientific without the narrative bias. More room for debate beyond the confines of what the author wants to push.

Also I never said The Economist denies climate change. They disparage green energy. All the people replying to my original comment never actually addressed the point I was making, they immediately jumped to "but the Economist doesn't do climate denialism" and got mad at my usage of the word propaganda

Either way, this article is crap and so is most of what The Economist comes up with because it--again--is propaganda.

Disparaging COVID safety measures means it's propaganda now? I absolutely get disliking the economist (they are war mongering at every occasion), but criticism of COVID measures isn't some sort of weird agenda lol. It only makes sense to look back and see what went wrong, and if anything there is a huge lack of criticism of how it all went down.

Like I don't get it, would it have been propaganda if they praised COVID measures or?

People are so conditioned to consume only propaganda that anything that isn't gives them extreme cognitive dissonance.

There's plenty of propaganda for the other side, the difference is that it doesn't get posted to HN. I don't see the value of posting propaganda on HN. There is very little substance to this article. Propaganda doesn't mean "something I don't like" it means something with the primary goal of getting me to subscribe to some belief.

> Like I don't get it, would it have been propaganda if they praised COVID measures or?

Yes, I am pointing out their bias. There is plenty of propaganda on the other side, but people aren't posting articles from Mother Jones or Salon or Breitbart on here.

In an article about energy deaths a COVID comparison feels very shoe-horned in. Propaganda can be factual, nothing in this article was not factual, but it's still propaganda. I find that the primary purpose of The Economist is to be propaganda, it has little intellectual value. Which is the point of the rest of my comment.

If people are really freezing to death because they can't afford a relatively small exess expense I'd conclude that we need to improve the social safety net. Perhaps raise taxes and subsidize heating for the poor and vulnerable. Not decrease energy prices overall, mainly benefiting large manufacturing industries, while simultaneously causing climate change. But that's not a conclusion you'll read in the economist...

In the UK it was a vast increase in monthly expenses (still is) and yes it was partially subsidised. What nobody did was the obvious step of insulating houses, despite years of protest from Insulate Britain, who were dismissed as weirdos.

Can't possibly be secondary effects of Covid-19, right?

Because that would mean we would have to acknowledge long covid, and possible immune system damage of repeated infections.

That won't do at all, people might want not to die for the ecconomy.

You can't separate the economy from the well being of people.

Good point

When robots do all the work you can.

Even robots need energy. If the robots produce the stuff, the robots are "the economy", even if money isn't involved. And if the robots can't produce because of lack of energy, that still hurts people.

On a short timescale, when talking to coked up rich guys, I think people are able to separate the two.

The evidence-based research on long COVID is limited and of mixed quality. From what I've seen, there are significant gaps in experimental methodology and a lot of studies based on extremely subjective surveys which don't effectively filter co-morbities. I would strongly caution you to examine the data before adopting a strong position on the issue and applying it to potentially unrelated phenomena.

Long COVID, from what I can tell / have read, is acknowledged by research[1][2]. The mechanism of it, and what is the best treatment for the people suffering from it, I think, are still the subject of ongoing research.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/...

[2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2

(etc.; there are numerous studies that are not hard to find?)

If the mechanism is not known, what do we know? Since almost everyone got covid, in what sense do we know this is at all associated with covid?

If you look closely at what those studies actually survey and how that data is collected, it's clear that many possible co-morbid conditions aren't adequately filtered out. There is _no_ objective test or evidence-based protocol that can conclusively diagnose "long COVID." Doctors must rely on checklists of broad symptoms and the patient's word. The CDC page you linked mentions this under "Data for Long COVID:"

>For example, some studies look for the presence of Long COVID based on self-reported symptoms, while others collect symptoms and conditions recorded in medical records. Some studies focus only on people who have been hospitalized, while others include people who were not hospitalized.

Can serious health conditions can arise as a lasting consequence of infection? Absolutely. Can we easily distinguish between those and other symptoms or conditions which may arise out of stress, anxiety, other unrelated conditions, or symptoms which in some (not all) cases may be psychosomatic? Can we accurately draw conclusions as to how many long-COVID patients there are in total, then apply that conclusion in other areas with confidence as the GP commenter has done? Not yet.

Though it is worth noting there is experimental clinical data providing a plausible pathway to suggest long COVID is a result of cell activity dysfunction with plausible biomarkers of dysfunction, and we've known this long enough to know long COVID is a real medical pathology (one distinct from acute infection based on biomarker evidence):

Elevated vascular transformation blood biomarkers in Long-COVID indicate angiogenesis as a key pathophysiological mechanism, https://molmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s10020-022...

Plasma Proteome of Long-covid Patients Indicates Hypoxia-mediated Vasculo-proliferative Disease With Impact on Brain and Heart Function (Preprint), https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-2448315/v1/8043bd...

>A unique two biomarker profile consisting of ANG-1/P-SEL was developed with machine learning, providing a classification accuracy for Long-COVID status of 96%.

The first paper used a random forest-based decision tree classifier built on markers in blood assays. Neat.

However, this study has a major flaw. They rated their classifier's accuracy on classifying blood marker profiles of acutely ill COVID patients, long COVID patients experiencing "diffuse symptoms" referred with "no selection process", and a healthy control group. The control group consisted of healthy patients whose blood samples had been banked prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's not clear whether they compared their classifier's results against people who've had COVID and recovered without issue, versus those who had COVID and continued to experience symptoms long after recovery. That is the entire point of developing such a classifier. This paper is worthless without that comparison.

Second paper has the same problem, and is honest about it:

>The healthy control subjects were individuals without disease, acute illness or prescription medications and were previously banked in the Translational Research Centre, London, ON (Directed by Dr. D.D. Fraser; https://translationalresearchcentre.com/). These latter samples were obtained prior to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in our region and therefore, were considered not to have been exposed to the virus.

These are fair criticisms. Fodder for future studies.

I only added these to say there's enough evidence to be questionable of the null hypothesis with regard to long COVID physiopathology.

Absolutely, and I'm glad you linked them! Cool to read about applications of ML in healthcare.

>Can't possibly be secondary effects of Covid-19, right?

It could be because of that, which is why the article address it, and accounts for in in their modelling.

Since this in the Economist, I'm surprised the author didn't go full Swiftean "Modest Proposal", and say that this is a good thing, because it frees up a lot of caregivers to do more productive things.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

Reading the comments of for this article, HN -> Reddit (or worse). This is political BS, nothing technical or entrepreneurial. Gresham's Law?

Guess it's time to go elsewhere - have fun, try to stay civil with each other and (somehow) return to tech-related topics. I'll check in at some point in the future.

I keep seeing more and more articles from The Economist reaching the top page and they're never good.

The comments are talking about politics because the article is politically motivated horseshit, not the other way around.

If you're lamenting the article making it to the front page though I hear you. HN has a weird boomer right wing uncle vibe when it comes to anything to do with the climate or renewable energy. Lots of people repeating the same tired easily debunkable soundbites and getting a disturbing number of upvotes.

It certainly seems to have killed several businesses in my city.

> Expensive energy may have killed more Europeans than covid-19 last winter

What is the point of this comparison?

To promote an agenda and misleadingly. It's trying to push cheaper energy (either by more negotiation with suppliers, or by way of reducing policies against it in regulations or taxes/tariffs), and it's trying to frame that need by comparing it to something that you might think is a huge killer (which Covid wasn't in the winter of 2022-23, anywhere.)

No, the point is that we all collectively shit ourselves over COVID, absolutely turning society upside-down. But we shrug at so many other existential threats because they are already by accounted for (like traffic fatalities) or happens to “someone else” (like drug dependency).

COVID was dangerous, and ignoring it completely wasn’t an option. But it is a reasonable rhetorical gambit to wonder why we responded to COVID so aggressively while ignoring other risks and threats.

All cause mortality seems to have near universally increase across many countries over the past 12 to 24 months. This can not yet be clearer attributed to something, or at least not publicly. But it is also clearer not covid.

What is most strange is the out right refusal to acknowledge this phenomenon by our ruling elite. There have been examples in the UK where parliament has actively refused to even listen to those that talk about it.

The movement towards renewables and away from reliable, inexpensive fossil generation will continue this trend in years to come. Gas generation is increasingly economically unviable with so much competition from renewables, but it remains necessary in order to provide baseload capacity, fill gaps when renewables are underperforming, and handle significant energy demand (e.g. an extreme winter storm).

Not to mention the many fossil-fuel derived goods that will face diseconomies of scale

The ultimate solution is to dramatically over build intermittent renewables so that the lowest trough of electricity production is enough to meet baseload needs.

The problem (or opportunity) then is what you do with all the excess energy during the peaks. Ideally, you also have a large fleet of responsive consumers that can quickly spin up/down consumption and pay for the electricity and keep the oversupply of energy producers economically viable.

The problem honestly is how grid is built.

For example, currently your neighbour having solar might, in worst case, cause you to have to pay for energy in peak, if they bump voltage high enough your inverter turns off.

You're also selling (if you don't have net metering) your produced power for pennies on dollar.

If, for example, instead of pushing that energy all the way could store it closer, now grid doesn't need to "do something with it", there are less losses overall, and less waste.

So if say a local muncipality or power company just built local battery storage facility and just "leased" capacity to its occupants:

* people with solar could "bank" the peaks to use it during night

* people without could enjoy lower energy prices overall

* people could "just" buy battery and consume more of that peak (buying electricity for cheap from their neighbours), and maybe even contribute pack.

* power company wouldn't need to push as much power and maybe even potentially do something clever like "preloading" batteries before peak usage so less of that is pushed from the big plants, or "borrow" some energy from the bank to push elsewhere where needed.

But that's complex and requires capital investments, and there is no motivation from power company to make stuff more optimal for customers, just for the investors.

Please explain how dramatically over building renewables will keep the lights on along the US West Coast after sunset? Where are we going to get power when there is little wind blowing and no sun shining anywhere in North America?

The reality is that the only way for renewables to provide base load is through huge amounts of storage. There are a variety of proposals for this but so far with current technology none seem to be economically viable at the scale needed.

The "large fleet of responsive consumers" is polymer electrolyte membrane electrolyzers, that produce hydrogen for making steel, fertilizers, plastics, and industrial chemicals. PEM electrolyzers can start up in seconds.

> The ultimate solution is to dramatically over build intermittent renewables so that the lowest trough of electricity production is enough to meet baseload needs.

Not always feasible. We had multiple months where winds were at historic lows for Europe, with lots of clouds, which meant much lower than usual wind and solar energy generation[1]. You can't overbuild enough for such a scenario.

1 - https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...

Look at all the research and implementation of carbon-neutral steel production (discussed here: ) - electricity is the TCP/IP of energy - if you can get enough energy deployed as electricity and you have a strong grid (including HVDC lines) then over deployment of renewable generation could usher in a new wave of uses for that excess.

It's a great problem to have, and we should strive to get there. In the meanwhile keeping baseload technologies that aren't massive carbon emitters is a good thing.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you wanted to see the implication that this article was trying to solidify in people's heads, this comment is it.

No, that isn’t the case. The article did not try to imply that green energy is to blame.

But let’s pretend it did, is that not a perspective we should analyze? If we are going to actively restrict sources of energy, we should quantify the externalities. Not to convince anyone that we shouldn’t take those steps, but because these are real trade-offs with real costs. I’m sure that someone who earnestly feels that climate change is an immediate existential threat would welcome the analysis.

> No, that isn’t the case. The article did not try to imply that green energy is to blame.

The point of this article was to reinforce the idea that cheap energy is important to a safe and stable society, which is true, but it ties into their overall narrative that green energy in its current form is inconsistent and poses a danger to our grid. Which is why the parent comment immediately had this reaction.

> is that not a perspective we should analyze?

Yes, it is, and it would be foolish to think that the green energy sector is not tackling this already. We are all familiar with the famous "duck curve" and when energy is in demand at certain parts of the day there is a market opportunity. There are tons of companies in the storage and arbitrage space using batteries, flywheels, whatever.

The Economist does not engage with this argument in good faith, it usually just does basic concern trolling. They will point out the issue with renewables, and they oftentimes wont outright give any possible solutions, but their implication is clear. They are a newspaper for the enforcement of the status quo after all.

as far as I can tell from the free accessible part:

their analysis seem to only make sense if you assume that Covid magically went away and/or Covid death are reliably detected even if the person dies at home in a context where "ways through which covid can kill you" happen to also be what they base their analysis on...

but at least personally I know of more cases of more serve Covid last winter then pretty much any time before, not very surprising given that Covid didn't disappear, still mutates but Germany had noticeable less steps to prevent Covid then before

and this are all cases which didn't in anyway decrease their usage of heat (i.e. earned enough to be able to cope with increased heating bills)

so idk. but from the parts which are not behind a paywall this looks like a very questionable analysis, which also happen to fit multiple political agendas very well, surely just coincidence but interesting anyway

Whats striking from the statistics is how younger ages (under 45) have been affected this winter compared to during the Covid pandemic https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

talking point of petrochemical industry PR -- "war on cheap energy" is another

This was also predicted to happen and politicians ignored (or worse, actively silenced) the predictions. Even mildly cooler conditions in winter for old people can inspire tons of respiratory infections

How is it that this article omits a discussion of the Nordstream Pipeline?

I'd guess the Economist likes being a going concern.

Did they die with expensive energy or from expensive energy?

It appears very fortunate that India has increased oil exports to Europe. May have reduced this impact somewhat and saved lives.

Unfortunately, India as of today is the top launderer (reseller) of ru oil

People should have been able to adapt to the need to use less heating energy. 1. Wear warmer clothing. 2. Very substantially cut down on the portion of the house you live in and consequently need to heat...

They did! They just lowered their body temperature by ~37 degrees and moved 2 meters underground.

Some people do consider this a sub-optimal outcome.

I don't disagree, but there are many elderly people with an irrational relationship with money in their later years. A friend talks about his 80+ year old neighbour with money in the bank and literally no family at all to leave an estate with. They fret over tiny financial decisions every day that would otherwise bring them comfort or purpose.

I remember my grandfather in his 80-90s not using the air-conditioning during heatwaves to save money. The price of power wouldn't have been a serious factor in his mind, just that it cost anything at all.

I assume decades of frugal behaviour makes for extreme conditioning that is hard to undo.

I find it kinda funny, I know few pretty rich people and you can notice which one started from something small and worked for it with frugality. Like boss wanted us to do a bunch of tweaking to run servers a bit hotter to save some on AC (we have small closed datacenter with like 2 racks). Absolute tiny savings in company hiring 50+ developers alone but hey it's savings

People should have been and to adapt to the need to fight off COVID. 1. Wear a respirator. 2. Live a healthy lifestyle to avoid obesity and chronic health conditions so the body is better and to fight off infection.

See? Being a twat is easy. Actually having a bit of compassion is the hard part.

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