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Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

ourworldindata.org

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Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#41

Post by jariel »

XorNot wrote: post #38
grecy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people are dying per month from overdoses in BC, Canada right now than from COVID...

I don't know what you think this proves. The lack of people dying from ebola doesn't justify not containing ebola.

I don't the the OP is 'trying to prove' anything, other than to demonstrate the magnitude of issues and concerns.

Furthermore - the fact that suicide-by-opiates has spiked, and is killing significantly more than those from COVID is actually fairly material.

"The lack of people dying from ebola doesn't justify not containing ebola."

It certainly does if the treatment for ebola is toxic, and more likely to kill you than ebola.

So while we don't want to entertain antivax/anticovid conspiracy ... at the same time our choices do affect outcomes in a lot of ways. 25% of Americans are having difficulty making rent right now, we can't discount these things.

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#42

Post by bagacrap »

4WIW wrote: post #17
centimeter wrote: post #3

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

I would expect deaths of despair to be slow-moving and not follow peaks of infection, as is with excess mortality: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...

I certainly don't think deaths of despair will be equally distributed between troughs of infections (when there's likely to be no lockdown) and peaks (severe lockdown).

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#43

Post by mytechtoday »

vitiral wrote: 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,…

The excess mortality in the United States doesn't make any sense at all. I followed the link to the article that contained the data regarding the United States, however it was an article that only dealt with the Eurozone and made no mention of "us" "united" "the united states" "America" or "usa" anywhere in the article, so I'm not really sure what evidence supports their claims about the USA?

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#44

Post by defrost »

centimeter wrote: post #3

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

One potential study would be a similar comparative analysis of mortality data from Melbourne Australia.

- Longest and strictest lockdown in G20 countries.

- Quality health records, low COVID deaths (as they were aiming to eradicate COVID risk altogether).

Factors difficult to adjust for would be the relatively high (compared to other countries) levels of economic support provided by Australia to those in lockdown, easing rent and utility bill concerns, etc.

Not all lockdowns are equal, after all.

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#45

Post by IronRanger »

jariel wrote: post #40
idoh wrote: 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.

The problem is that due to significant and pervasive behaviour changes, other forms of mortality and altered. In some places, there are apparently many fewer people dying from the flu, because, well, we're isolated from one another! Similarly, fewer car accidents. Suicides are probably altered, as well as violence in some cases, in particular domestic violence. People forgoing treatments for any host of disease due t…

The other factor little talked about in Europe is aged carers - usually from Eastern Europe and the FSU - rushing to return home to their families in the midst of border closures, lockdowns, and flight cancellations.

This lead many residents to die of neglect, or for COVID to sweep easily through many centres if the remaining staff worked whilst symptomatic and took shifts across multiple locations.

This is part of the reason why countries in EE and the FSU, as well as those with less strict lockdowns (ie. Sweden), had lower mortality rates than in places like the UK, Spain, Italy, France.

It might be worth reconsidering the whole aged care model, and advancing the idea of voluntary euthanasia for the elderly.

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#47

Post by jb775 »

idoh wrote: 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.

This data is BS.

Firstly, it's nonsense to take "average amount of deaths" over the past few years and extrapolate it to the current year without accounting for population growth changes, and rate of population growth acceleration.

Secondly, if you look at the "expected U.S. Death Rate" data[1], it shows that they expected U.S. death rates (per capita) to rapidly accelerate about 7 years ago, but the rate of deaths didn't really begin that acceleration cycle until ~2 years ago:

2017: 858.0 deaths per 100,000 predicted

2018: 868.5 deaths per 100,000 predicted

2019: 878.2 deaths per 100,000 predicted

2020: 888.0 deaths per 100,000 predicted

----------------------------------------

2017: 731.9 actual deaths per 100,000 [2]

2018: 723.6 actual deaths per 100,000 [3]

2019: 867.8 actual deaths per 100,000 [4]

2020: Could be anywhere between 835-910 depending on the population data and total death numbers you use to calculate

----------------------------------------

Not sure why people aren't dying as fast as they initially thought (probably modern medicine, etc), but that simply means there were more old people on the verge of dying coming into 2020. So even if 2020 shows a per-capita increase in deaths, it's to be expected.

[1] - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat... [2] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf [3] - https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/death-rate-per-100... [4] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#48

Post by sam_bristow »

IronRanger wrote: post #45
jariel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that due to significant and pervasive behaviour changes, other forms of mortality and altered. In some places, there are apparently many fewer people dying from the flu, because, well, we're isolated from one another! Similarly, fewer car accidents. Suicides are probably altered, as well as violence in some cases, in particular domestic violence. People forgoing treatments for any host of disease due t…

The other factor little talked about in Europe is aged carers - usually from Eastern Europe and the FSU - rushing to return home to their families in the midst of border closures, lockdowns, and flight cancellations. This lead many residents to die of neglect, or for COVID to sweep easily through many centres if the remaining staff worked whilst symptomatic and took shifts across multiple locations. This is part of t…

What do you mean by that last paragraph? Because on first read it sounds like you're suggesting something horrifying and I hope there's a more generous interpretation I've missed.

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#49

Post by jb775 »

tialaramex wrote: post #11
just-juan-post wrote: post #8

Any purpose to this post other than scaring people? How about you compare things to previous years instead.

Um, the nature of excess death is that it is comparing to previous years. This is a normal statistic we calculate to compare particular events to a long term trend, in this case as you see, this event (a global pandemic) has resulted in huge excess mortality in some countries such as the US.

It's comparing current year death totals to previous year death totals, but isn't taking into account the rate of population growth acceleration, and expected death rate acceleration.

This is the definition of misinformation.

Re: Excess mortality from March to December of 2020

#50

Post by redis_mlc »

hinkley wrote: post #6
idoh wrote: 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”)

> I know at least one person who’s having problems exacerbated by lack of mobility. Atrophy in old people can be a big problem.

His name is Biden. You can see it on video when he shuffles to the podium.

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