Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia • Hacker News Board

Re: Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia

#21

Post by chrisco255 » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:55 AM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #10

gridlockd wrote: post #5

Some things to consider from looking at the raw data: The 5-year average minimum of deaths from "Influenza and pneumonia" is about 50 cases per day. The average for 2020 is about half that. Adding up COVID fatalities and "Influeanza and pneumonia" after July comes to about 50 cases per day. In other words, there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July.

> there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July Correct, and that correlates neatly with the number of recorded cases of covid19. One could even draw the conclusion that if less people have covid-19, less people are likely to die from it.

The death rate has plummeted not merely the infection rate. Even where "second waves" are occurring around Europe the death rate for this second wave is substantially lower.

https://metro.co.uk/2020/09/20/second-wave-of-cases-not-caus...

Re: Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia

#22

Post by lwansbrough » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:55 AM UTC

Very difficult to compare this data. Flu deaths will be down this year because of all the additional precautions taken around transmission, which may disproportionately affect flu virality (ie. perhaps COVID still manages to transmit despite precautions while flu does not.) Then if you say okay compare a previous flu year, you’d have to compare with the same conditions, which in a typical year would be no masks, barriers, social distancing, etc. And I think we all know how much worse COVID would be if we weren’t taking any precautions - we were warned for months about it.

So I’d imagine the initial observations that COVID is about 3-4x as deadly as the flu (and not 10x+ as some of these numbers suggest) are probably accurate enough.

Re: Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia

#23

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:55 AM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #8

bb123 wrote: post #2

This is pretty damming to anyone who claims "its just the flu": “More than three times as many deaths were recorded between January and August this year where COVID-19 was the underlying cause compared to influenza and pneumonia." “The mortality rate for COVID-19 is also significantly higher than influenza and pneumonia rates for both 2020 and the five-year average." “Since 1959, which is when ONS monthly death recor…

The number of deaths from flu, pneumonia, and Covid are about 50% higher than the year 2000 (Jan-Aug) and about 25% higher than the year 1983. Do those numbers justify draconian shutdowns and bankrupting half of humanity? I'm not so sure. In the early days, we believed that Covid was 10-20 times deadlier than the flu, and that's what was used to justify the draconian measures. Note also these numbers are for the UK,…

[deleted]

Re: Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia

#24

Post by noobermin » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:55 AM UTC

born_a_skeptic wrote: post #3

I'm not a statistician or a scientist, but I don't it does any good to lump everything together over the past ~9 months and compare it to Influenza and Pneumonia. Just think about it. We barely knew anything about covid or how to treat it at the start of the year. Now, it seems like we have a better understanding and how to potentially treat it. Compare this to Influenza/Pneumonia, which I'm just guessing we've been…

Why make this point and ask for a moving average? The fact that it is new and unknown is part of why it is deadly, and that is reflected in the statistics. Why try to erase one takeaways from this set of statistics?

Re: Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia

#25

Post by titzer » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:56 AM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #8

bb123 wrote: post #2

This is pretty damming to anyone who claims "its just the flu": “More than three times as many deaths were recorded between January and August this year where COVID-19 was the underlying cause compared to influenza and pneumonia." “The mortality rate for COVID-19 is also significantly higher than influenza and pneumonia rates for both 2020 and the five-year average." “Since 1959, which is when ONS monthly death recor…

The number of deaths from flu, pneumonia, and Covid are about 50% higher than the year 2000 (Jan-Aug) and about 25% higher than the year 1983. Do those numbers justify draconian shutdowns and bankrupting half of humanity? I'm not so sure. In the early days, we believed that Covid was 10-20 times deadlier than the flu, and that's what was used to justify the draconian measures. Note also these numbers are for the UK,…

> In the early days, we believed that Covid was 10-20 times deadlier than the flu, and that's what was used to justify the draconian measures.

I'm looking at this [1] data, Table 4, specifically the row for April.

Deaths in April

Pneumonia+Influenza, 5yr avg: 2,354.8

Pneumonia+Influenza, 2020: 1,933

COVID: 29,128

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=%2fpeoplepopulationandcommun...

April was peak, pre-lockdown, full-blown pandemic conditions. That's a 12x difference. Bad. Shit.

Re: Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia

#26

Post by throwaway936482 » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:57 AM UTC

gridlockd wrote: post #5

Some things to consider from looking at the raw data: The 5-year average minimum of deaths from "Influenza and pneumonia" is about 50 cases per day. The average for 2020 is about half that. Adding up COVID fatalities and "Influeanza and pneumonia" after July comes to about 50 cases per day. In other words, there is no excess mortality from COVID-19 since July.

Largely because we locked down the entire country and had largely stopped community transmission by then I imagine. Now that lockdown has been lifted and what restrictions there are are increasingly being ignored we are seeing increased community transmission, a concomitant increase in hospital admissions and should start seeing an increase in deaths over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully this wave of deaths will be lower because we are better prepared and have better treatments, and also because the rise in infections is being driven by young people.

Re: Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia

#27

Post by MrsPeaches » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:57 AM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #4

This chart from Sweden says its not worse than influenza: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ejd0IpdVcAASTqR?format=jpg&name=... Looking at the source data, the numbers seem roughly right: https://knoema.de/atlas/Schweden/Sterblichkeitsrate I don't know what to think anymore.

Have a look at those dates along the bottom of the charts.

COVID dates are in spring, Flu is the middle of winter. TBF we don't have data on what COVID is like in the winter so the jury is still (a little bit) out on what that looks like but this comparison is misleading.

I bet if you plotted Flu for those dates (i.e. in spring) you would see significantly fewer deaths than from COVID.

Re: Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia

#28

Post by rimliu » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:57 AM UTC

evgen wrote: post #17

gridlockd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem right to me. Euromomo does show a bump for Sweden, though it is still smaller than some other countries that did lockdowns: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps Also, several countries show no excess mortality.

Compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors like Norway, Finland, and Denmark and the cost of Sweden's failed response becomes pretty obvious.

Compare the last few years then. Sweden did not have a bad flu seasons unlike the neighbours, who did.

Re: Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia

#29

Post by ryanjshaw » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:57 AM UTC

MrsPeaches wrote: post #12

ryanjshaw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it's much more complicated than this? Assuming the COVID-19 assigned deaths are accurately labelled, how many COVID-19 deaths would have been pneumonia/influenza deaths? How many pneumonia/influenza deaths from 2021, 2022, ... have been brought forward to 2020? How much has the lockdown contributed to poor immune systems? Which age groups are affected more, were they already at life expectancy? It's obviously…

From TFA: "The analysis of COVID-19, influenza and pneumonia deaths in this bulletin focuses on deaths where these conditions were the underlying cause of death (deaths “due to”), rather than deaths where the conditions were either the underlying cause or mentioned as a contributing factor (deaths “involving”). Data for deaths where COVID-19, influenza and pneumonia were a contributing factor are available in the acc…

I made a number of points and I'm not sure which point this quote is meant to address as it doesn't appear to address any of them?

There is no way to know if somebody would have died from the flu/pneumonia if they didn't first die from COVID-19. Excess death calculations provide a hint but are confounded by additional variables created by the lockdown (eg people not getting exercise, not getting checkups, not eating as well, depression, etc.)

Furthermore excess death calculations can only take into account < one year of data at present. We don't know if it takes off 0.5, 1, 2, 3 or more years of your life expectancy ie. would you likely have died of a respiratory illness in 2021, 2022, etc. - these are important questions, I've seen estimates saying 8 years - which is a very compelling argument for lockdown - but would 0.5 or 1 year have the same gravity?

Re: Deaths due to Covid-19 compared with deaths from influenza and pneumonia

#30

Post by nebolo » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:57 AM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #4

This chart from Sweden says its not worse than influenza: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ejd0IpdVcAASTqR?format=jpg&name=... Looking at the source data, the numbers seem roughly right: https://knoema.de/atlas/Schweden/Sterblichkeitsrate I don't know what to think anymore.

Even if this data was correct, the difference is that in 2020 there were pretty stringent measures in place to reduce the spread of Covid (which were not in place in the past for major influenza outbreaks). We do not have a clean counterfactual to what the number of deaths would be in the absence of those measures, but the height of the outbreak in Italy can perhaps serve as some approximation, and there the excess mortality was orders of magnitude above previous years.