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Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

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Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#21

How can we separate out deaths of despair (suicides, overdoses, etc.) brought on by lockdowns?

What do you mean? Those things will still be recorded normally.

I mean people will point to all-cause excess mortality as a justification to say "Coronavirus killed X million people" even if half of those were lockdown deaths.

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#22
post #6
post #2

Excess mortality seems like the best way to track the pandemic because determining whether someone died of covid can be debatable sometimes, but there can be no debate over whether someone died.

I know at least one person who’s having problems exacerbated by lack of mobility. Atrophy in old people can be a big problem. I would not go so far as to support anyone claiming this is why we should be breaking quarantine, but can’t quite support racking them all up as COVID deaths either. Reality is somewhere between the two (but close to “most” than “few”)

There are quite a few risk increases associated with general shutdown. This is one with large impact. Another large impact is mental illness, in particular presenting in suicide and substance abuse. On the other side, many other common risks are reduced: workplace injury, other transmissible ailments.

If the purpose of the analysis is to determine whether the preventive measure is effective and not overwrought, an excess deaths analysis is a good one because it helps infer what the toll would be in absence of the measure.

If the purpose is to attribute cause of death, it’s just a heuristic. But a useful one when other methodologies are (rightly or wrongly) suspect.

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#23
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know at least one person who’s having problems exacerbated by lack of mobility. Atrophy in old people can be a big problem. I would not go so far as to support anyone claiming this is why we should be breaking quarantine, but can’t quite support racking them all up as COVID deaths either. Reality is somewhere between the two (but close to “most” than “few”)

I am confused by this. Either this person is only mobile in indoor spaces for some reason or this person lives somewhere they were doing police checkpoints if you leave your house (like Bangalore). I've spent at least 2x more hours outside, walking, riding bikes, hiking, hitting golf balls, etc. There's nothing else to do but be outside. The fact that I don't have to go into the office and no longer can or want to vi…

It really depends. My outdoor activity levels are way down. I used to hit 2-3 miles a day just going to work, lunch, the grocery store, meetings, etc which I don’t get anymore.

It’s not that I don’t have the Time to make it up, but there’s a lot of days where I only left the house because I had somewhere to go (cold, rainy, busy, etc). There’s a huge difference between “I have to walk to the store because we’re out of bread” and “I have to walk around the block because I need exercise”

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Those things will still be recorded normally.

I mean people will point to all-cause excess mortality as a justification to say "Coronavirus killed X million people" even if half of those were lockdown deaths.

But those deaths of despair are measurable and also comparable against “normal” levels, and can be easily separated from deaths where the cause is less certain but where symptoms may have aligned with potential covid infection. They track more than the body count. There will be studies of the mental health toll of the pandemic and its response. We won’t just tally those as likely disease.

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#28
I'm very confounded by the "Excess mortality by age group" data in the US. It _appears_ as if the mortality increase is _almost the same for all age groups_, especially at the beginning and after the initial hump. 15-64 yr olds had a 32% higher chance of dying at the hump and stayed above 11% for most of the year. Wow.

All the previous findings were that COVID is _extremely unlikely_ to kill you if you are under 50, and pretty unlikely-ish under 70 -- so where are these deaths coming from?

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#29
post #28

I'm very confounded by the "Excess mortality by age group" data in the US. It _appears_ as if the mortality increase is _almost the same for all age groups_, especially at the beginning and after the initial hump. 15-64 yr olds had a 32% higher chance of dying at the hump and stayed above 11% for most of the year. Wow. All the previous findings were that COVID is _extremely unlikely_ to kill you if you are under 50,…

I can't answer your question, but I do happen to know that there has been a large increase in drug overdoses and suicides according to the data I've seen for a specific region I was looking at recently. No idea if it's a national trend.

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Those things will still be recorded normally.

I mean people will point to all-cause excess mortality as a justification to say "Coronavirus killed X million people" even if half of those were lockdown deaths.

You're trying to see something in the data that isn't there. Even if there was a spike in suicides, it would be a drop in the ocean compared to the excess deaths attributed to physical symptoms of COVID-19.

For what it's worth, Melbourne just went through one of the harshest lockdowns (in order to successfully eliminite the COVID-19 in the state), with no spike in suicide rates [1].

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-27/no-spike-in-suicide-r...

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